Diamond Queen
The Diamond Queen Who Reigns from the Throne of the Void is the founder and mother of the Zenith Order Monks. She was once a Haarkeen girl who from a young age was privy to the prosperous business of her family. So taken by commerce and her kind father’s craft, she learned much of the world before most would have, and she traveled to more distant lands at a tender age than many would in a lifetime. Her education was well rounded and deep, and she had an easy time when the occasion came to please important people. Nonetheless, she was damned with true seeing eyes and, at the young age of fifteen, witnessed the murder of her family at the hands of cruel men. She would have died, if not for the kindness of a Pyroi merchant who was seeking iron to sell to the bladesmiths of his Folk. She accepted passage aboard the merchant’s airship and, after a long journey, it was the wind-blasted sky-shores of violet Zenith that the travelers found. Much to the Pyroi’s surprise, the girl thanked him and wandered up into the mountains, vanishing behind a ghostly dune of snow. It didn’t take long for the girl to realize how woefully unprepared she was for such a place as Zenith. She tried to hide in small caves for warmth, but each time the vicious winds would turn and shift and what was briefly respite soon became a rime-packed tomb. Snowblind and hopelessly lost, the girl sank to her knees in the snow, surrendered to her death, and prepared for dissolution into the endless white. So it was nothing less than miracle and mercy when her eyelids parted and the gentle faces of strange beasts stared quizzically at her, as they balanced a teacup’s edge against her still trembling lips. The Hamanu had found her against a snowdrift and brought her to warmth and shelter in their hidden temple within a carved mountain face. As she sat upright, she stood in wonder of the beautiful wall carvings and stonework. The lines considered the natural forms of the mountain’s shapes, and the kind- faced Hamanu immediately transmitted a deep feeling of trust and friendship. The Hamanu did not appear like the girl at all. They were enormous and lanky, like tree- dwelling things from a distant shard, but they lumbered gently about the cave, the intricately carved charms which ornamented their fur tinkling softly like falling snow. The warriors among them wore bands of iron on their forearms. But the Hamanu were also humble in their own way, and their ritual ornaments were worked so finely as to make an Aurumel master weep, while their records poetically captured the history and stories of a remote time unknown to anyone else. The bond that the girl would come to share with the Hamanu named Boundless Mirror was like no other. Their friendship is the friendship through which the potential of such a bond is entirely realized. And it was by the grace of that bond that they walked the Path together. It is this very example that forms the beating heart of the Zenith Orders’ most sacred and shared experience — for the Monks of the Zenith Orders form Overlight bonds with the Hamanu, the likes of which are not repeated across the Seven.